In general, a drug packing apparatus is an apparatus for automatically packing drugs when the drugs are prepared based on a prescription prescribed by a doctor or pharmacist in a hospital or pharmacy, rather than directly and manually packing the drugs.
Conventionally, the drug packing apparatus includes a plurality of cassettes disposed at an upper part thereof and arranged in a multi-stage, and different kinds of pills (tablets) are accommodated in the cassettes. The tablets accommodated in the cassettes interfaced with a computer are selectively discharged from the cassettes through a user's computer operation, and the discharged tablets are gathered in a hopper to be packed at a packing part provided at a lower part of the drug packing apparatus.
The above method of accommodating the tablets in the plurality of cassettes and discharging and packing the tablets through the operation of the computer is referred to as an automatic type, and a method of manually inserting and packing the tablets in a plurality of trays is referred to as a semi-automatic type. Meanwhile, a combination type drug packing apparatus of the automatic type and the semi-automatic type is also used.
Meanwhile, the drug packing apparatus may include a separate tablet dispenser installed inside or outside the apparatus to supply tablets such as narcotic drugs (hereinafter referred to as special tablets), which cannot be accommodated in the cassettes, to pack the special tablets with the tablets accommodated in the cassette. The conventional tablet dispenser may include a main body and a driving part. The main body includes a space part formed therein to accommodate tablets, and a guide track formed along an inner wall upward from a bottom part in a spiral shape to guide movement of the tablets accommodated in the space part. The driving part is configured to vibrate the main body such that the drugs are moved upward along the guide track to be moved to the outside of the main body.
The tablets accommodated in the tablet dispenser have various shapes, for example, a substantially spherical shape, to be in point contact with the guide track. In this case, since a contact area between the tablets and the guide track is small, some of the tablets may not be moved to an upper side of the main body along the guide track. In addition, since coated tablets may have a small frictional force against the guide track, the coated tablets may not be moved to the upper side of the main body along the guide track.